No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Pedantic]

Well, as soon as a subsystem is needed, I'll have to look it up, read and understand it - at least if I want to use it. Either I have to do it preparing a session (investing my time), or, if I didn't know it would come up, I would have to halt the session to read up on it.
To me, this seems like a much bigger burden than just using the core system that I already know.

Yeah, but that is its own cost. You're trading fidelity and depth of gameplay for ease of use. Which is fine, but not free, you now have less decision points and less places for players to interact and less unique emergent situations.

That position is as strawmanable as the much derided set of college textbooks. Why have a book? We already own coins, heads you do the thing, tails you don't is already a perfectly cromulent resolution system.

There is an actual tradeoff between writing more complete rules and not doing so. You could set the terms of that balance differently, but when you decide to go ahead and read up on the cost of commercial goods for your player's new shipping enterprise, you're not spending that time for no gain.

 

[Maggan]

And I don't think it's a coincidence that the games that tend to succeed over the long haul are the ones that tend to big sets of rules, not just for the economic reality that as a publisher you need to publish or perish, but because they do a much better job of sustaining play and providing for a variety of aesthetics. So, yes, we need big tomes.

As an exampel of the opposite, in Sweden Dragonbane (in various rules light versions) has occupied the position that D&D has in the states since 1982. It has a fiercly loyal following, it is the strongest commercial rpg here and while it's not an international commercial behemoth like D&D, it is a game that has been published for 42 years, and which has launched and sustained countless campaigns over the years.

 

[Celebrim]

I am not using red herrings or ad hominem attacks. I am citing the many RPGs that function and are not 1,000 pages. They exist as evidence that your claim is incorrect.

Sure. They function well as limited toys that do one thing and are great for one offs and short campaigns. Eventually they are constraining and people drop them. Or maybe they just have very limited aesthetics of play and exercising their thespianism in a narrative game with a lot of low melodrama is enough to entertain them for hundreds of hours at a time. In which case, sure, you don't really need rules.

Or else they just disappear, quite unlike the games that did provide 1000 pages of crunch.

Again, you may prefer that they have more rules, but you have not established... nor can you... that they need more rules.

I think I've done a very good job of establishing why you should as a publisher be aiming to provide more pages with real value. Bloat is obviously a problem, and I'm fully on board with the unnecessary rules bloat of 3.5e, 4e, or 5e.

the core would seem to be that you're arguing your subjective view as if it is objective fact

That's just bias. The OP offered up his position just as concretely: "Therer is no reason that 5E (or any other edition for that matter) can't be presented in a concise, complete, robust form like Dragonbane." It's that declaration that I'm trying to show is wrong. That you happen to agree with the OP's claim is why it doesn't bother you how it is presented as objective fact, while that you disagree with me is while my equally strongly stated claimed does.

 

[Swanosaurus]

Yeah, but that is its own cost. You're trading fidelity and depth of gameplay for ease of use. Which is fine, but not free, you now have less decision points and less places for players to interact and less unique emergent situations.

That position is as strawmanable as the much derided set of college textbooks. Why have a book? We already own coins, heads you do the thing, tails you don't is already a perfectly cromulent resolution system.

There is an actual tradeoff between writing more complete rules and not doing so. You could set the terms of that balance differently, but when you decide to go ahead and read up on the cost of commercial goods for your player's new shipping enterprise, you're not spending that time for no gain.

Yes, exactly, but the choice what trade-off is best for you is individual to you and your group. I just take issue with the stance of "if you think you're better of with your 100-page system, you're deluding yourself, because this system is LACKING!" In any case, the granularity of the system doesn't limit your options in play, because these are story-dependent; it just limits the degree of detail supported by the rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure! I absolutely concede the truth of that. So what? Do you think the sort of situations you find yourself in are always covered just by a core resolution mechanic? The only mechanical support you need for your games is just a core skill system mechanic? Everything is just process simulation referencing a core skill system, and that's the whole of your problems and verisimilitude issues? You never find the need to tack on sub-systems?

I actually gave a couple examples of this earlier: climbing and stealth. Its pretty unlikely a simple core mechanic is going to do an adequate job with those without some degree of elaboration. Probably swimming too, far as that goes. With stealth, its compounded by the question of how viable you want it to be and how you see it working in general; there are a lot of simple elaborations on it that tell you what you need to know, but what they'll tell you is "Don't expect much out of it, especially if its a group doing it", which is fine if that's what you want, but you should make sure that is what you want, and a lot of simple pass/fail (even with crits and fumbles) systems will often tend to do that if applied in a simple fashion.

 

[Reynard]

Related to doing the 5E SRD in 100 pages: I think they intentionally crippled the SRD PDF so it is a giant PITA to get the text out. I was going to do an example with the Dwarf race entry and
every
word
was
on
its
own
line
after
cut
and
paste

 

[Swanosaurus]

Eventually they are constraining

... and that is based on your previously uttered notion that "if there's no rule for something, the players usually won't even think of trying it", which, as far as my experience goes, is just not a general truth. As far is I can see, this is the whole extent of the misconception at work here.

 

[Reynard]

I actually gave a couple examples of this earlier: climbing and stealth. Its pretty unlikely a simple core mechanic is going to do an adequate job with those without some degree of elaboration. Probably swimming too, far as that goes. With stealth, its compounded by the question of how viable you want it to be and how you see it working in general; there are a lot of simple elaborations on it that tell you what you need to know, but what they'll tell you is "Don't expect much out of it, especially if its a group doing it", which is fine if that's what you want, but you should make sure that is what you want, and a lot of simple pass/fail (even with crits and fumbles) systems will often tend to do that if applied in a simple fashion.

If you expect to climb, swim or sneak, those things will be covered by the rules. If that isn't part of the expected play activities, making a Fitness check (or whatever) should be sufficient.

 

[Emberashh]

I'm actually really bad at that. I'm fine with winging something by using a simplistic solution; but I hate following a more complex procedure not really knowing if I actually understand what I'm doing. (That's why doing my tax declaration is such a nightmare to me.)

If a procedure is complex, it probably isn't what I'd call solid.

While I'm naturally on the other side of this discussion, I don't think whats being argued for here is tabletop calculus. Having adequate procedures to cover the trappings of the gameworld isn't the same thing as having complex procedures.

For example in my game I have probably the most realistic take on how someone would "Get Lost", which is based in directly simulating how Navigational Drift works.

But I can explain the procedure in a single sentence.

Every 12 miles travelled, your path will have a 50% chance of shifting 1 hex to either the left or right, and this can be mitigated by a party member utilizing the Set Course action, or by following a road.

This is ezpz of course, and for context, Set Course induces a "Pacing" penalty, basically limiting how far you can go, and following Roads fixes your Pacing to a set value depending on the quality if the Road.

Its a roll to move system, and the Party's building up their Pacing (or not) through their various Travel Actions.

Getting lost here is not just realistic, as it directly simulates how navigation actually works, but is dead simple, and much less arbitrary and feels bad.

It's sort of like claiming you have to memorize three monster manuals before you can play D&D, or that it's a greater mental burden to look up the stats of a Bulette in a book than it is to run one by fiat with no recourse to rules.

Indeed. This is why I came up with the Quantum Enemy, which I now just call the Enemy Block.

Generic stat blocks that let you improvise a fully mechanized enemy, from lowly mooks to full on Boss level mobs, on the fly. They're not as bespoke as a dedicated stat block, but if the partys fighting something that never had a Stat block in the first place, well there you go.

They'll also pull double duty as a canvas for people to design their own bespoke Blocks without having to learn any convoluted math.

 

[Celebrim]

I actually gave a couple examples of this earlier: climbing and stealth.

IIRC, I called those two specific skills out as well so it sounds like you and I both have a lot of real world GMing experience.

I could get into other ones potentially like lifting, jumping and carrying, but there the reason a single core mechanic tends to fail is different than the first two. Simple single core mechanics just fail to give robust results continuously, and I have seen tables deal with that in two ways. Some just lean heavily into fiat and house rulings and full GM trust, and sort of whenever they hit an exception drop the rule. Others just avoid doing anything that would challenge their rules. But obviously there are tradeoffs in both approaches. The first for example means any real sort of challenge aesthetic is hard to maintain because the GM has so much power that you're confined to just cooperative story telling of some form.

But I'm not even really getting into the questions of how you really design a robust challenge resolution system. We can assume for these purposes that such a robust complete challenge resolution systems exists in about 30 pages of space. I'm not going to complicate the discussion by getting into even why that can be a bad idea.

I'm saying that you've barely begun to build a game at the point that you have some sort of generic fortune mechanic.